


if you see your soulmate standing out in a field

by KathrynShadow



Category: DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5 Times, Clark smiles a lot and Bruce is irritated at how charming it is, Gen, Midwestern nonsense, bless your heart, cliche country behavior, y'all'd've being used unironically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:41:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: “Y’all’d’ve just gotten hurt,” Superman mumbles as he uses Bruce’s entire body as a crutch. “Had to be me.”Batman freezes in his tracks. “What,” he says, “did you just say?”--For the Country Clark kinkmeme prompt.





	if you see your soulmate standing out in a field

**Author's Note:**

> [Full prompt:](https://dceu-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1491.html?thread=90067#cmt90067) So, I've had the Reba song "Fancy" on repeat for a few days and now I want all the fic of country folk in the big city. Doesn't necessarily have to follow along with the song - I just really want more people playing up Clark's country side. 
> 
> I don't mean I want a full-blown, overly stereotypical country accent - but I just want him saying "y'all" or using a country phrase that makes Bruce look at him funny. Maybe Clark's super tired because he hasn't slept well for a month and his accent's thickened or maybe he makes three cow jokes too many and Bruce doesn't know how to Deal With This.
> 
> Sorry, I'm not trying to be overly specific. Basically: Clark's country side comes out and Bruce is confused.

i.

“I tipped a cow once,” says Clark.

Bruce gives him a flat look. “Nobody tips cows,” he says.

Clark smiles. Bruce is pretty sure his dimples have dimples. He’s not certain that should be possible. “It was a bet,” he says. “I was a dumb kid in high school. We all were.”

“I spent my junior year learning six languages and my senior year learning how to incapacitate people with one hand tied behind my back,” Bruce says. “Literally.”

“...okay, all of us mere _mortals_ were dumb kids in high school.” Which is a frankly ridiculous thing for the superpowered man who has _literally_ come back from the dead, but Bruce is too tired to call him out on that right now. “Somebody heard about it and tried it, found out they couldn’t, and tried making a bet out of it.” Clark smiles. “I won. I made sure the cow was okay, but Pa found out anyway and tore me a new one for it.”

“Is that so,” says Bruce flatly.

Clark lays a hand over his chest, just where Doomsday disintegrated half the organs inside his ribs. “Cross my heart,” he says solemnly.

It is deeply disturbing to Bruce that he finds himself taking that on its own as being good enough. But he has a reputation to maintain, and he has a Kryptonian to avoid encouraging at all costs, so what he says is just: “Hmm.”

 

ii.

The Justice League is absolutely, _definitively_ not a pot luck dinner party. Bruce feels like he has made himself very clear on that front, if only by dint of never saying that it is, and never asking anyone to bring food, and only not telling Alfred _not_ to feed everyone because he knows that it’s a fruitless endeavor.

Clark, as is his wont, does not appear to get that message. And Bruce supposes that, to his credit, the first couple of times that Superman shows up with a tray of something ludicrously unhealthy did much to get everybody over the _holy shit that’s_ **_Superman_ ** _being real and alive and talking to me_ phase.

Okay, mostly just the Flash. A little bit Cyborg. Aquaman gave him a once-over and a short nod and went _“Nice,”_ Wonder Woman beamed that acre-wide smile that Bruce suspects might actually light up the room and proceeded to hug Clark within an inch of his life. But the Flash didn’t really calm down until he destroyed half a plate of chocolate chip cookies by himself and found out that Superman had a mother to get recipes from.

(Bruce can relate, as little as it makes sense. It hadn’t been the knowledge that Superman could feel pain that had made him stop; it hadn’t been the knowledge that he could feel fear. It had been the simple fact that Superman had a family, a living mother, whose child he had been on the verge of murdering. As if he didn’t know what that kind of pain felt like.)

Anyway. It had helped, at first. Bruce wasn’t sure what to think when the Flash started bringing things along too, and then had known things were getting deeply out of hand when _Wonder Woman_ joined in (because he could absolutely get any of the others to behave, but Diana Prince was another matter entirely).

And now there is… this. This…

This.

“What is that,” Bruce says, as Superman swoops into the Cave, cape flaring out behind him like a banner, and delicately places a glass tray on the workbench. It is full of something dull yellow and covered in enough powdered sugar to choke somebody with. Bruce can smell it from halfway across the room.

“Gooey butter cake,” says Superman, and then he does that _absurd_ smile. “I realized none of y—uh, none of you would have had it before. Except Barry, I guess.”

“I’ve had it before,” the Flash confirms, and appears by the tray’s side. _“Ooh,”_ he adds. “Your mom’s again?”

“Yeah,” Clark affirms. “Taught me when I was a kid. Haven’t made it much since I left Kansas, but I think I got it right.”

Bruce tries to calculate exactly how much butter has to go into something before it gets a third of the name all to itself. It’s a little worrying. “I see,” he says.

He resolves to not touch whatever that substance is, but Clark just turns his goddamned eyes on him and—

And it’s just as ridiculously, incredibly sugary as it looks. Bruce finds himself irrationally fearing a whole host of blood sugar-related incidents after a single bite. It’s a wonder anyone in Central City is still _alive_ if it’s as much of a thing in that section of the country as the Flash makes it out to be. Hell, it’s a wonder _Clark_ is alive, even with his superpowers.

Ugh.

 

iii.

“Y’all’d’ve just gotten hurt,” Superman mumbles as he uses Bruce’s entire body as a crutch. “Had to be me.”

Batman freezes in his tracks. “What,” he says, “did you just say?”

Superman rolls his eyes and then immediately stumbles. Bruce catches him without thinking, propping him up a little more and trying not to be irritated when the Kryptonian takes this as an invitation to use his shoulder as a place to shove his eyes. “Don’t start with me,” he says somewhere behind Bruce’s back. “I’ll be fine. I—”

“Not that,” Batman interrupts.

“What?”

This isn’t working. He starts trying to limp them both along again; the faster he can get Clark under the sunlamps, the faster he’ll start making sense. “You all,” he says. “Would have.”

There is a very pregnant pause. “Oh,” says Clark finally. His insistence on shoving his face into whatever part of Bruce is nearest and moving the least starts to feel less like he’s too dizzy to look straight and more like he’s just hiding. “Right.”

“That’s four words, Clark.”

He snickers. “Callsigns only, Batman,” he says, in a voice that’s clearly supposed to be mimicking Bruce’s modulator but mostly just sounds like a slightly deeper version of sleepy-as-hell Clark Kent.

“ _Four words._ ”

“Wait ’til you hear me say ‘ain’t’.” It sounds worryingly like a threat.

 

iv.

“You don’t have to go taking bullets for people, Batman.”

Batman glares at the ceiling for five seconds and then gets back to trying to dig the thing out of his arm before Alfred hears about it. (Which he probably already has, but Bruce is nothing if not… well. He’s many things other than optimistic these days, but he’s trying.)

Superman realizes, unsurprisingly, that Bruce is trying not to look at him. He steps around the chair to stand on the other side of him and loom there instead. “ _Bruce._ ”

“Force of habit,” he says, voice clipped. He hisses, pressing his forceps into the hole. The bullet is mostly whole, from what he can tell; that’s nice. “Most of the people I worked with before the League were… regular humans like me.”

“Bless your heart, Bruce, that doesn’t mean—”

He snaps. He can’t help it. “ _Don’t_ ,” he grinds out, yanking the biggest fragment out and dropping it onto the floor through the sheer power of rage alone. “I’m not a goddamn idiot, Clark, I _know_ what that actually means.”

Clark blinks, mouth open. And then he closes it. Unfortunately, he opens it again. “Well,” he says tersely, “maybe if you weren’t so determined to sacrifice yourself for whatever you think the greater good is at the time.”

At least he admits it, Bruce thinks bitterly.

 

v.

Batman hasn’t rested off his injuries at all in the months since Superman threw him into a car and then dropped him from a rather uncomfortable height. They were minor enough (for a given measure of what he was used to sustaining) that he didn’t think it necessary, and he managed to conceal a lot of the lingering discomfort from Alfred (somehow, or maybe Alfred was just so happy that he was being kinder to himself psychologically that he let the physical aspect slide a little); he’s slowly regaining fragments of his long-destroyed optimism, but not enough for him to think that crime would instantly snap back down to a pre-Doomsday baseline after Superman very publicly returned. Slowing down his own patrols during such an upheaval was unthinkable, _and_ he had the fledgeling League to look after in his own distant way, _and_ the rebuilding efforts after everything that had happened, _and_ the Manor—

So. He does a little less with his left arm, but he doesn’t rest, and he doesn’t slow down, and it’s fine. Until it isn’t.

Clark is there, because Bruce is trying—really, honestly trying—to be better about letting anyone be. It is in Gotham, but the ringleaders are from Metropolis and the tech looks like it was based off of Kryptonian salvage, so there’s even less of a reason to keep him away. And it’s… it turns out to be a good idea as much as it’s a terrible one, because Bruce is a little more reckless than he should be just because he’s not tracked down enough kryptonite to feel that Clark is really _safe_ yet and it’s hard to remember he’s invulnerable when Batman had to watch him die, and—

There’s some… abrupt demolition, probably as an attempted coverup. Bruce on his own probably would have seen the signs, but he was watching Clark. Clark on his own is more used to doing evac after natural disasters, or taking out people with guns and grenades, than checking for sabotage. So neither one of them is looking for it, and neither one of them notices it.

Clark tackles Batman to the ground just as the basement starts to light up; it probably saves his life, but it also pins him between a concrete floor and a tensed-up Superman at speeds much faster than baseline humans should move, and Bruce feels something in his shoulder give in a way that he instantly knows is going to be a problem.

Shit.

And then the actual explosion really _hits_ , and it’s not just the shoulder anymore; Clark did his best (because he always does, Bruce has been learning that since the night he died), but he can’t perfectly cover every single part of Batman’s body. This Suit was designed for routine work, not for getting buildings dropped on it; when a chunk of debris bounces off of Clark’s thigh and into Bruce’s shin, the armor at least makes sure it doesn’t crush the leg off above the ankle, but the pain is so sharp and sudden that he can’t keep a noise from ripping out of his throat.

“Sorry,” Clark is saying, as he pushes up against the rubble. “Geez, _sorry_ —”

Batman breathes, staring at the insides of his eyelids, fists tight at his sides. The leg is the worst—razor-edged and aching all at once, there are definitely at least some hairline fractures or a bruised bone, the bulletproof plating almost as unforgiving as the concrete itself—but the shoulder feels weirdly hot, bowstring-tight and demandingly painful. He can still move his fingers (so many years since he recovered from Bane and there are still few possibilities that terrify him more than not having full command over parts of his own body), but it doesn’t feel right. Nothing feels right.

He can’t ignore his way out of this one. He knows that in the deepest parts of his psyche, the same little niggling senses that told him that he was too late for Jason or that he was going too far in his war or that someone was yanking his chain and his hunt for Superman was too easy to not be a trap; this is… he can’t.

But he’s going to try anyway.

“Don’t worry about it,” he grates out. “Just—” And he moves even the tiniest bit and even that is too much.

Damn it, damn it, _damn it._ He’s going to need… he’s going to need to call in a lot of favors from a few people. Mostly people he should be on speaking terms with, but isn’t. He won’t ask Dick to leave Blüdhaven undefended, but Kate might stay local if he asks, and… and he should probably apologize to Barbara regardless.

Victor will absolutely be a pain about it, but there’s no particular reason he wouldn’t help. Bruce has never done anything unforgivable around _him_.

Clark is still carefully moving, shifting the chunks of concrete and rebar, trying to widen the miniature cave his reflexive tackle made for them. He could just shoot up into the sky, be out of the debris in a fraction of a second, but he’s making sure that nothing else is going to fall on Batman while he does it. (It’s more concern than he would have ever expected from him, before, and somehow that just makes Bruce feel worse about it all.) “Most of the building is still intact,” Superman says. “I don’t see anyone else in the rubble.”

He looks down, and bone-deep instinctive chill shoots through him at the way Clark’s eyes look just then. There isn’t an overlay; they haven’t shifted colors like they do when he’s using the heat, but they’re focused in a way that fundamentally _is not human_. Bruce can’t blame Arthur for freaking out about being looked at like this.

But the expression around the eyes is all concern, and the sharpness fades after Clark does a quick visual sweep over what Batman can only assume is his entire body. “You don’t look so good,” he says.

“Thanks,” Bruce answers dryly, pure reflex.

Clark seems startled into a laugh. “You know what I mean. Can you—how much can you move?”

Batman tightens his mouth. “Get me out of here and we’ll find out.”

He gets a Look for that, but it’s slightly more concern than it is irritation. “Sorry for this in advance,” Clark says, and he scoops Bruce up in his cape and starts pulling him slowly up, still shielding him as much as he can. It’s going to hurt no matter what, but it would be nice not to get any _more_ injured on the way out.

Clark doesn’t put him down until they’re on the street, which is a little irritating, but at least he puts Batman down on his feet. Or his foot, anyway; the second Bruce tries to even experimentally put weight on the other one, enough pain lances up from his ankle to his knee that he immediately reconsiders that idea.

He could still drive with a messed-up leg; that’s not a problem. But—he tries moving his arm again and nearly whites out from the pain—he’s not about to try shifting gears with whatever he’s done to it. (Frankly, he doesn’t want to ask.)

He’s lost enough of his cars over the years that he doesn’t think twice about leaving them behind if they’ve been destroyed, but it hasn’t been touched this time around; he can still see it parked in the alley across the street. It won’t be there for long if he has Superman carry him out alone, and he’s not about to let any of the tech he installed in there fall into any hands that aren’t his own. And as much as he knows that Clark could carry him and the car home at the same time, Bruce isn’t exactly capable of holding on.

He closes his eyes. “I’m going to need you to drive,” he says, voice tight.

“...what?”

“Shoulder,” Batman says. “Manual transmission. _Very_ manual transmission.”

Superman takes a slow breath, as if Bruce has just asked him to do something much more impressive than driving a car. Even if the car is the result of decades of tinkering and perfecting, fidgeting with it until it’s completely optimized; even if he’s spent more time working on it than he’s spent with almost any actual person he knows—

“Okay,” Clark says. “Need me to give you a hand over there? And… do I need to do anything to convince it I’m not trying to steal it?”

Bruce snorts, looping his good arm over Clark’s shoulders in lieu of answering the first question. “It’s not sentient,” he says. “The AI is too limited to qualify. And it’s not like any booby traps I installed would work on you, anyway.”

“Doesn’t mean I feel like setting them off,” Clark answers. He doesn’t quite _carry_ Bruce on the way there, but there’s much less weight on even the good leg than there reasonably should be.

“You won’t,” Batman says. “Especially not with me here. Stop worrying.”

Clark snorts. “I’ll stop worrying when I’m dead,” he says. “Again.” A couple of halting steps pass in silence before he speaks again. “What, too soon?”

Bruce rolls his eyes hard enough to make his shoulder twinge again, somehow. _“Yes.”_

“Sorry,” Clark says, but he sounds terribly cheerful about it.

Things start going wrong when Superman gets in the driver’s seat and spends a solid ten seconds just staring at the console. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Look, I know you said that the booby traps wouldn’t go, but… I don’t know what half of these things do.”

Batman tries to find a comfortable way to exist. There doesn’t appear to be one. “You know how to drive stick?”

“I’m from Kansas, Bruce. I know how to drive stick.” And that just… that just sounds a little bit _wrong_ the way Clark says it, but Bruce doesn’t want to think too long about why. “I don’t know how to drive _tank_.”

Ah. “There are failsafes built into the weapons systems,” he says, debating on whether he wants to deal with the seatbelts pressing into his injuries. “You couldn’t turn them on accidentally if you tried.”

“If I were trying, it wouldn’t be an accident,” Clark points out, but he at least stops staring behind the steering wheel and starts buckling himself in. (As if it even _matters_ for him—although it would at least matter for the car, not having a person-sized unstoppable force bouncing around inside it.) Bruce fiddles with his gauntlet and the car thrums to life; Superman, absurdly, flinches a little in surprise.

 _“Passenger detected,”_ the car says. _“Defense systems offline.”_

“Right,” Clark answers. “Right. Thank you?”

“Don’t thank the car,” Bruce says.

“I wasn’t,” Clark mutters unconvincingly. “Are you going to put your seatbelt on?”

He… regrets a few things. Most things. Almost everything. “That depends,” Bruce says. “Are you going to actually drive?”

“Not until you do that.”

Batman grits his teeth and pulls the straps awkwardly over himself. He isn’t sure if he’s gratified or irritated that Superman doesn’t offer to help; he’d feel a little insulted if Clark tried (he’s not nearly incapacitated enough that he can’t do it, damn it), but it hurts like a bitch on his own. “Happy?” he asks.

Clark smiles. “So far,” he says. And then, finally, _finally_ , they start actually moving.

He could put the autopilot on, but it can be a little tricky to manage the transition to manual control if something goes sideways, and Clark is nervous enough about the car without having to worry about that aspect. Superman takes the turns a little more slowly than Batman would, but he’s not used to the car and he’s probably hoping not to jostle Bruce too badly; it’s not the worst thing in the world. He mentions it once or twice, but not to very much effect.

Until they make it out of the city and they’re _still_ going at what feels like a crawl, and Bruce has to speak up. (Again. But he’s arbitrarily deciding that the first two times weren’t enough, because this is _ridiculous_.) “You can speed up, you know.”

“We’re going the speed limit.”

Bruce tries not to twitch. “We are _not_ going the speed limit. We’re going—” he leans over to check— “ _ten_ miles below.”

“I’m being safe,” Clark protests.

“I want you to examine the car you’re in and think about what you just said.”

Clark actually slows down a little just to give him an irritated look for half a second. This is how Bruce is going to die, he thinks. “Is that one of the failsafes?” Clark asks dryly. “Senses what the speed limit is, blows up if you’re going below it? That would explain a few things.”

“Clark,” Batman says, with the modulator, in the particular tone of voice reserved for family members doing something very stupid. He learned it from Alfred; since the formation of the League, it’s become invaluable.

It does absolutely nothing. “There could be deer,” Clark says primly.

“We’re barely out of the goddamn suburbs. There are no _deer_ in _Gotham._ ”

“That’s not true.” The side of Clark’s mouth twitches in a way Bruce is quickly beginning to hate. “There are five deer.”

This… this is almost physically painful. Or maybe it’s just the shoulder. It’s hard to tell. “Oh, I’m sorry. There are _five._ And you know where each and every single one of them is, so you know exactly when they’d be getting close anyway.”

“You don’t like my driving,” Clark says, and no no _no_ he does _not_ get to bring out the half _you’re being unreasonable, Bruce_ and half kicked puppy voice out right now. Or ever, but especially not when Bruce is in enough pain that he can’t ignore it, physically can’t move his arm nearly as much as he needs to for almost anything useful, he’s having to just sit here and endure being driven home at what is probably twenty miles an hour at best—

“I’d like it fine,” he says, jaw clenched, “if what you were doing right now counted as ‘driving’ in the first place.”

“I know that people in Gotham drive a little differently, but the rest of us do it right.”

No. Absolutely not. He doesn’t care how ludicrously powerful the man is; no one gets to talk shit about Gotham unless they’re from there. Batman bristles. “You’re not driving right,” he says. “You’re driving me up a wall, you’re driving me insane—the only thing you’re _not_ driving is right.”

Clark shoots him a look fast enough that Bruce honestly suspects he used the speed for it. “Keep talking like that and I’ll slow down more.”

“You’d keep me from medical attention?” Batman asks, trying to sound more in pain than irritated.

Clark has the audacity to smile a little. “Keep talking like _that_ and I’ll insist on staying to help look after you.”

So much for that. “Don’t you have a job to go to?”

“I’ll just suit up to leave. Even if I didn’t live alone right now, I wouldn’t live with someone who didn’t know who I was. No one will notice.”

Bruce does his best not to feel like the second part there is a personal attack. Clark would never mean it that way, it’s just—of course he’s so unfailingly honest, of course he wouldn’t lie to someone about his fate-of-the-world related hobbies if he got that close to someone. Just.

Clark doesn’t mean it that way, but Bruce would. He’s trying to get better about that kind of projection, but it isn’t working as much as he wishes it did. “Hm,” he says.

“Actually, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea,” Clark continues blithely. It’s surprisingly hard to tell if he’s still joking or not, and that worries Bruce more than it should. “I can keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t push yourself too hard…”

“You wouldn’t dare.” He momentarily imagines Clark just… being there at him, following him around, probably insisting on feeding him. Giving him coffee in the morning before leaving, making sure—

Bruce shuts that down so fast he nearly gives himself a headache.

Clark grins and it’s nearly blinding. “No, it’s a great idea. I know you won’t take care of yourself without constant supervision. I’m putting my foot down.”

“It better be on the accelerator.”

The laugh Clark gives him for that is almost worth this entire, terrible journey. (But not quite.)

**Author's Note:**

> SPECIAL SHOUT-OUT TO PROTODAN, WHO NOT ONLY BETAED THIS BUT PROVIDED ALL OF THE BEST BANTER IN PART V


End file.
